In the months before American voters went to the polls, Twitter said, some of these campaigns with foreign ties sought to stoke social and political unrest around hot-button issues, echoing tactics that social media companies have spent two years trying to counter. The approach had been adopted by the Internet Research Agency, an organization with ties to the Russian government, two years earlier in an attempt to steer the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

Source: Los Angeles Times January 31, 2019 22:18 UTC